T.X. Watson's Pre-EVENT blog

I may not be very good at it myself, but there are few things I like more than an argument I think is stupid being called stupid. Not wrong, or questionable, or inaccurate, or fallacious, but stupid.
On the one hand, I don't totally like the idea of shaming people out of the debate. It strikes me as unsavory. But on the other hand, (a.) everyone's doing it -- no side of any large argument doesn't use mockery as a tactic, and (b.) some people really do need to be shamed out of the mainstream debate.

The thing I linked to there is called the Overton Window, a concept in politics that argues there is a range, that moves based on popular opinion, of positions politicians can have. For example, on race: reinstituting race-based slavery is well outside the Overton window. Segregation is also very far out. Repealing the civil rights act is outside the window, but politicians like Ron Paul have advocated for it, and their popular support drags that window back.

When we start to get towards the other side of the window, through the acceptable range that now predominantly consists of "doing nothing," things like new proactive government efforts to break multi-generational cycles keeping white people up relative to everyone else, and keeping people of color down, have to compete with a political dialogue that challenges the legitimacy of explicitly stating that discriminating on the basis of race is wrong.

On gun control, organizations like the NRA flood the dialogue with insane, fringe, indefensible arguments that, though they hold no real weight logically, hold back the political discussion by forcing politicians to compromise with people who think that giving everyone guns would make the world a better place.